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مطالب بيشتر از admin در صفحه اختصاصي نويسنده پيوسته‌ها Creative Abjection and Sacrifice in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner نويسنده: Alexandra Bailey تاريخ نشر: 30- 06-2008 Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner (2003) chronicles the story of Amir, the son of a wealthy merchant, living in Afghanistan, and his relationship to Hassan, his servant and friend. My favourite part of reading to Hassan was when we came across a big word that he didn’t know. I’d tease him, expose his ignorance. One time, I was reading him a Mullah Nasrudin story and he stopped me. “What does that word mean?” “Which one?” “‘Imbecile.’” “You don't know what it means?” I said grinning. […] “But it's such a common word! [...] everyone in my school knows what it means [...] Let's see. ‘Imbecile.’ It means smart, intelligent. I'll use it in a sentence for you.   Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner (2003) chronicles the story of Amir, the son of a wealthy merchant, living in Afghanistan, and his relationship to Hassan, his servant and friend. While Amir enjoys Hassan’s company, he is extremely envious of his father’s particular admiration of their servant and in such moments, Amir sides with his community’s general disdain for servants of the Hazara community. During a kitefighting competition, which the two boys win, Hassan does his part by running after the final conquered kite. As he is retrieving the kite, Hassan is attacked and raped by a bigoted bully. Although Amir accidentally witnesses the rape, he fails to prevent it, because he fears the kite will be destroyed and his father’s approval lost. The event precipitates in Hassan’s departure from the home and his eventual demise at the hands of the Taliban. Amir and his father, Baba, escape to America where Amir marries a woman named Soraya. Their infertility seems predestined as one day Amir’s former mentor, Rahim, calls from Pakistan in order to give Amir instructions on how to redeem himself by returning to Afghanistan and adopting Hassan’s orphaned son. Drawing on a study of Julia Kristeva and her thoughts on Jacques Lacan, I will argue that Amir’s sacrifice of Hassan at the scene of the rape is a result of his fall out of the Symbolic order. Here the Symbolic order is a term used to describe the world of linguistic communication, intersubjective relations and law. Subsequently, however, it will be argued that the protagonist pursues a creative, self-inflicted abjection or subject/object dismissal that celebrates the positive possible outcomes of boundary failure, or the failure of the individual to conceive of him/herself as a subject within a Symbolic economy. Supporting a less logo-centric conception of the world, Amir learns to see and to contribute to that aspect of Afghan national identity which figures subjecthood as effacing of the self/other binary. In Sacrificed Lives: Kristeva on Women and Violence, Martha J. Reineke explores Kristeva’s examination of Lacan and her theory of sacrifice. Reineke explains that Kristeva borrows from Lacan the notion that human existence is a practice of absence (18). First, as infants, individuals experience themselves as fragmentary, a stage which Lacan refers to as the Imaginary. Subsequently, infants pass through the “mirror stage”. Either through another’s gaze or an actual reflection of themselves, individuals establish their subjectivity at the site of the mirror(ing gaze)(Reineke 19). That is, subjects first experience unity when they see themselves through the eyes of another. At this point it becomes clear that the site of establishment is a non-site and that the subject must, “abide faithfully by this Law if it is to secure its altogether fragile position in the world, for its self-possessed status is essentially a façade” (19). Kristeva, like Lacan, imagines that to see ourselves as unified is to gain subjecthood through communication and language. Unlike Lacan, however, Kristeva produces a category of existence, termed the “abject”, in which individuals experience themselves as neither subject, nor object (20). Instead of being “nothing”, like the object, the individual who experiences the abject experiences a “something” that cannot be defined (2). In a state of abjection, an individual undergoes boundary failure, a realm of existence that bears an uncanny resemblance to the Imaginary, or again, what Kristeva re-names the maternal matrix, the pre-linguistic site of disunity. To enter into language rescues the subject from this stance, but if experienced again, later on in life, it can result in “matricide” and/or sacrifice of women’s bodies. I discuss how this theory of sacrifice can be applied to the body of the Other more generally, and how the state of abjection can result in a creative renegotiation of the terms of the subject/other complex.   Amir’s love of language and his ability to read shores up his sense of self and, by extension, his sense of power, privilege and justified violence. When Amir recognizes that "words are secret doorways, and I h[o]ld the keys" (Hosseini 32) he demonstrates his understanding that reading to his servant and illiterate companion, Hassan, is a politicized act; one that is inescapably bound to the desire to find subject-hood in the absence or annihilation of the other. Amir describes the joy he gets from taunting Hassan with the “mystery of words”: My favourite part of reading to Hassan was when we came across a big word that he didn’t know. I’d tease him, expose his ignorance. One time, I was reading him a Mullah Nasrudin story and he stopped me. “What does that word mean?” “Which one?” “‘Imbecile.’” “You don't know what it means?” I said grinning. […] “But it's such a common word! [...] everyone in my school knows what it means [...] Let's see. ‘Imbecile.’ It means smart, intelligent. I'll use it in a sentence for you. ‘When it comes to words, Hassan is an imbecile.” ( Hosseini 30-31) Amir acts as a translator, inscribing meaning onto Hassan. Although this scene is relatively playful and innocent, Amir further underscores how engrained his sense of the subject/object binary is after he has finished telling Hassan the story of Sohrab and Rostam. In a tale of miscommunication, the valiant warrior, Rostam, kills his mortal enemy Sohrab, only to discover that Sohrab is, in fact, his long-lost son. Hassan cries at the end of this story, perhaps because he is subject to the consequences of blindness in the face of external signs/the facade of otherness, as is Sohrab. On the other hand, Amir wonders: “didn’t all fathers in their secret hearts harbor a desire to kill their sons?” (32). For Amir, the external signs, even as codes or tricks, tell the truth then. There is no gap between the sign and the signified: the clothing that hides Sohrab’s true self, in fact, allows the father to fulfill his true wish (to kill his son).   Amir’s greatest wish is to have words match empirical truth, because if language fails to signify in a one-to-one relationship then his subjectivity, vested in the Symbolic order, will inevitably falter. Thus, when Hassan tells him that he simply feels where the kite will land when he is kite running, Amir questions his intuitive knowledge: “How can you know?” Hassan answers simply, “‘Would I ever lie to you, Amir agha?’” (Hosseini 57). Amir takes this opportunity to show that he demands proof of every sign made or uttered. He asks: “‘I don’t know. Would you?’” and when Hassan replies that he would rather eat dirt than lie to Amir, Amir demands verification: “‘Really, You’d do that? […] Eat dirt if I told you to?’” (57). He wishes to see to what extent he can inscribe Hassan with the violence of language. Amir revels in the idea that Hassan will deny the arbitrariness of this violence. He works from the assumption that those who have mastered language are those who hold the power of interpretation and meaning and that the others will abide by this Law. Amir experiences boundary failure because his own father threatens the Symbolic order in which he invests. Despite Amir’s attempts to maintain a distance from his servant by employing the violence of language, he recognizes that Hassan is literate after all, only on different terms: “How could I be such and open book to him […] I was the one who went to school, the one who could read, write […] but he’d read me plenty” (Hosseini 65-66). Amir’s father undermines his son’s sense of subject-hood by investing in the body or the abject, rather than language, in a manner that favours Hassan: “‘You know what always happens when the neighbourhood boys tease [Amir]? Hassan steps in and fends them off […] I’m telling you Rahim, there is something missing in that boy’” (24). Correspondingly, he is appalled by Amir’s interest in creative writing: “His glare made my throat feel dry. I cleared it and told him I’d written a story. Baba nodded and gave a thin smile that conveyed little more than feigned interest” (33). As the Symbolic order crumbles around him, Amir’s death-work (that labour which uses absence to create presence or subjectivity) becomes attuned to a sacrificial economy: “Under threat of radical loss of place, subjects turn to soma in order to reinscribe, resecure, and commit to memory the border-securing work of negativity that first saw them emerge out of the mimetic violence of a primordial difference into the world of the sign” (Reineke 29). As neither subject nor object, Amir perceives himself as abject or “phony,” a position from which he is prepared to commit a crime in order to re-assert his subject-hood. As Kristeva suggests, the only method of re-asserting difference once one has already emerged from the maternal matrix is by laying bare its abject marks: “With material, visceral gestures, subjects return to the bar of the signifier, ‘killing substance to make it signify’” (30). Kristeva believes that violence is acted out, in such moments, primarily on the bodies of women because, while she doesn’t believe that the maternal matrix is equivalent to the maternal body, she understands that the human investment in signs makes it desirable to equate disunity, and pre-lingual arenas with the womb (31). When Amir allows violence to be visited upon Hassan’s body after the kite-fighting competition, he does so because he directly perceives Hassan to pose the same threat as a face-to-face encounter with the maternal matrix (Hosseini 76).   Hassan, in his paradoxical nature, is both ‘other,’ as a Hazara servant who does not have power over language, and an alternative representative of the subject in a Symbolic economy, as he knows things without reading. As a body that refuses to signify in the Symbolic order, he matches the description of the Imaginary or maternal matrix, the space in which the subject is not yet a subject nor an object; where the self is expressed as fragmentary. Hassan is forced to show signs of the abject when he is raped by Assef after he tries to bring home the blue kite that Amir has won in the annual competition. Amir notes: “I pretended I hadn’t seen the dark stain in the seat of his pants. Or those tiny drops that fell from between his legs and stained the snow black” (Hosseini 84). Reineke explains that “Marks such as blood, bodily fluids, and other refuse attest at the very edges of language to boundary failure and its contestation” (30). Amir’s contestation of his boundary failure costs Hassan his precarious role as a subject and affords Amir complete subject-hood, at least temporarily: “Nothing was free in this world. Maybe Hassan was the price I had to pay, the lamb I had to slay to win Baba” (Hosseini 82). For Amir, winning Baba means owning a seat in the Symbolic order. As the novel progresses, Amir learns, with ever-more striking clarity, that he too can be subject to the violence of language. When, in America, Amir and his new wife, Soraya, attempt to have a baby and fail, they visit a doctor. The visit is described in the following terms: a blur of tests […]: Basal body temperatures, blood tests for every conceivable hormone, urine tests, something called a ‘Cervical Mucus Test,’ ultrasounds, more blood tests, and more urine test—Dr. Rosen inserted a telescope into Soraya’s uterus and took a look around. He found nothing. ‘The plumbing’s clear,’ he announced, snapping his latex gloves. (Hosseini 195) Amir and Soraya are informed that they are the victims of “‘Unexplained Infertility’” (Hosseini 195). In other words, their bodies refuse to signify. Similarly, when Baba is taken to the hospital with his first signs of cancer, the doctor sends Amir home with a word that also refuses to signify: “I wanted to ask him how I was supposed to live with that word, ‘suspicious’ for two whole weeks. How was I supposed to eat, work, study? How could he send me home with that word?” (163). In America, Amir and his father become subject to a kind of illiteracy that destroys Amir’s ability to act as a subject. When Rahim Khan calls Amir in America and tells him that there is “a way to be good again,” he suggests that subject-hood for Afghans must be performed by accepting the disablement of the subject/object binary and identifying with the abject (Hosseini 202). When Amir discovers that Baba has slept with Hassan’s mother, Sanaubar, making Hassan Amir’s half brother, the final chasm between sign (Hazara/servant) and signifier (half-brother) is revealed. Nonetheless, when Rahim Khan suggests that Amir must go back to Afghanistan to rescue Sohrab, Hassan’s orphaned son, Amir whimpers with fear. Rahim Khan reminds him of what Baba said: “‘Rahim, a boy who won’t stand up for himself becomes a man who can’t stand up to anything’” (233). Exploring the salience of masculinity, Jeff Hearn quotes David Gilmore discussing his cross-cultural survey of manhood: "One of my findings here is that manhood ideologies always include a criterion of selfless generosity, even to the point of sacrifice” (209). Where Kristeva proposes that men kill women in order to rectify their shattered masculinity, Hosseini points out that, in Afghanistan, killing the self, so to speak, is the acceptable route to manhood. During their escape from Afghanistan, when the Russian soldier demands half an hour with the woman in the back of the truck, Baba demonstrates this type of otherdirected value system, “‘Tell him I’ll take a thousand of his bullets before I let this indecency take place’” (Hosseini 122). Not only is Afghan masculinity infused with elements of self-abjection, but the novel further subverts western understandings of masculinity by making this sacrificial subjecthood a trademark found in equal quantities in the lower classes. When Baba sleeps with Hassan’s mother, he taints both the honour of Hassan’s father, Ali, and his own honour by conceiving a half-Hazara child. Both men work at regaining their subjectivity by fiercely giving of themselves. Ali treats Hassan like his own son and Baba builds orphanages and gives to the poor (14). It is this custom of sacrifice which Hassan upholds when he chooses rape over giving away the kite. Early in the novel we are told that “Afghans cherish customs but abhor rules” (55) and that “when a kite runner had his hands on a kite, no one could take it from him. That wasn’t a rule. That was a custom” (55). While Hassan has been raped, rendering him, in typical terms, an object, he has also lived up to this idea of custom, which includes ‘taking it like a man’ in order to uphold a self-determined connection to a site of belonging. By submitting his own body to a process of abjection, Amir creatively appropriates the process of boundary failure in such a way as to make this failure represent his new understanding of this diversified subjecthood. Masculinity, from this perspective, is represented here as specifically Afghani and differing from the logo- centric, binary-pushing trajectory Amir embraced in the beginning. After Amir is beaten nearly to death by Assef, the bully turned Taliban leader who has claims on Hassan’s son, Amir records what he remembers: “Choking on my own teeth, swallowing them, thinking about all the countless hours I’d spent flossing and brushing” (Hosseini 302). He juxtaposes the kind of sterility inherent in the medical discourse that pervades the novel with the mission he is now on. Losing all those hours, vested in the medical discourse, he gains a sense of re-composure: “I felt healed. Healed at last. I laughed” (303). A fragmented sense of self gives rise to a coherent sense of self. A loss of memory replaces language with images: “They talk rapidly, use words I don’t understand. I hear other voices, other noises, beeps and alarms. And always more faces. Peering down. I don’t remember any of them” (307). His lack of memory renders him self-less, yet: “They all ask questions. Do I know who I am? Do I hurt anywhere? I know who I am and I hurt everywhere. I want to tell them this but talking hurts” (307). His sense of his own ontology persists and renews itself, but it is no longer bound up with language, with the ability to ‘say’, in words, who he is. Amir’s sacrifice gives him greater control over medical language. This control is not one he intends to impose, rather it is a control that elucidates further for him the arbitrariness of language and its violence. When Sohrab takes out Assef’s eye with a slingshot, Amir notes: “Blood oozed between his fingers. Blood and something else, something white and gel like. That’s called vitreous fluid, I thought with clarity. I’ve read that somewhere. Vitreous fluid” (305). And when Amir arrives in the hospital the only random face he remembers is the face of his doctor: “the one with the gel in his hair and the Clark Gable mustache, the one with the Africa stain on his cap. Mister Soap Opera Star. That’s funny” (308). Earlier the stain on the surgeon’s cap had been called “a dark stain” alluding to the notion of the dark continent. As this image is imprinted on the surgeon’s cap in blood, it becomes clear that the surgeon stands in for the colonizer of the dark continents who has bloodied the soil found there. But Amir’s image of the man as Mister Soap Opera Star reveals Amir’s recognition that the colonizer is a phony. Through his sacrifice, Amir has been given the mark of the abject subject that is private and permanent and which will remind him how to avoid, once again, becoming the colonizer with “blood on [his] hands” (329). Having decided to make a sacrifice, the medical language and its assault on his body have been appropriated in order to help Amir reconstitute the body of Hassan within his own. Maurice Blanchot describes the work of sacrifice as following this responsibility toward the other: “responsibility, which separates me from myself (from the ‘me’ that is mastery and power, from the free, speaking subject) and reveals the other [autre] in place of me, requires that I answer for absence” (As quoted in Keenan 144). Amir reconstitutes his subject-hood through an investment in the abject. In closing, taking into consideration Kristeva’s thoughts on sacrifice and subjectivity, I have tried to show how subjecthood and masculinity can be formed in direct conflict with the Symbolic order. While Amir demonstrates an initial dedication to the Law of language and its ability to guarantee subjectivity, his sacrifice of Hassan, coupled with pressure from the men in his community, illuminates for him the problem of language and the violence of inscription. Recognizing the self-deception inherent in the practice of absence, Amir chooses to accept boundary failure as a state of radical potential and, in The Kite Runner, this kind of sacrifice of economy is revealed as a specifically Afghani notion of virtue.   Bibliography Hearn, Jeff. “Is masculinity dead? A critique of the concept of masculinity/ masculinities.” Hosseini, Khaled. The Kite Runner. Toronto: Anchor Canada, 2003. Keenan, Dennis King. The Question of Sacrifice. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2005. Kristeva, Julia. The Powers of Horror. New York: Columbia UP,1982. Reineke, Martha J. Sacrificed Lives: Kristeva on Women and Violence. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1997.   موضوع مرتبط: english news/articles   ○ چاپ مطلب ▐ ارسال مطلب

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